60th anniversary of liberating KL Auschwitz-Birkenau, 27th January 2005.
Address at the state ceremony by the President of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah

SIMONE VEIL

My heart swelling with emotion, I am addressing all of you gathered in this particular place. Sixty years ago, the electrical fences around the Auschwitz Birkenau camps were fallen and the world stood dumbstruck to discover the greatest cemeteries of all times. Before the Red Army arrived here, most of us had gone down those stairs of death where so many people perished.

More than one and a half million of human beings were exterminated here, most of them sent to gas chambers right upon arrival, their only guilt being that they were born Jews. At the platform nearby, men, women and children were brutally thrown out of the carriages, submitted to a several-second-long selection, with a single gesture of Mengele, who thus determined the right to live or sent to their death thousands of Jews, persecuted and pursued in most countries on the European continent.

What would have become of them, of this million of Jewish children, murdered in their infancy or in their youth, here, or in ghettos or in other death camps? Would they have become philosophers? Artists? Great scientists? Or perhaps just skilled craftsmen or mothers of families? All I know is that I keep crying whenever I think about them and that I will never forget them.

It is true that some people, including the few survivors present here, were brought here and served as slaves. Most of them died of exhaustion, hunger, cold, disease, others were sent to gas chambers being unable to work any further.

But it was not enough to destroy our bodies. Our soul, our identity, our humanity were also taken away from us. Stripped of identity, upon arrival we were assigned numbers, still tattooed on our forearms. We were just "items", pieces of ourselves.

The Court in Nuremberg which tried the Nazi leaders for crimes against humanity, pronounced this to be a violation not only against the victims themselves, but against whole humankind.

And yet, the desire of all of us that this should "never happen again" has not come true. There have since occurred other cases of genocide.

Today, 60 years later, new commitments must be made. So that people unite in a struggle against hatred, against anti-Semitism, racism and intolerance.

The European countries which have twice got the entire world entangled in the madness of annihilation have managed to overcome the demons of the past. It is here where the absolute evil came into being that also a resolve was born to build a brotherly world, based on respect for man and his dignity.

We have come here from all continents, believers and non-believers. We all live on the same planet, and belong to the human community. We should be alert and defend ourselves not only against looming natural hazards but first and foremost against human madness.

We as the last former inmates have the right -- an obligation, even -- to warn and to beseech you to make sure that the sufferings like those of our fellow inmates "never again" become reality.